Dancer by Colum McCann Page A

boy. I figured that Rudi would never be able to handle Petr, but he picked up two spoons, rose quickly, pushed his way past the rubber plants to the door, beckoned us all to follow. The simple strangeness of his action silenced us, although RosaMaria smiled as if she knew what was in store.
    Rudi made his way down the corridor to the bathroom and sat down in the empty bathtub.
    This, he said, is authentic.
    He began to bash the spoons against the porcelain, reaching different notes where the bath curved, with longer, hollower notes at the base of the tub, higher notes where the spoons met the rim. The taps rang high metallic twangs, and then he reached to hit the spoons against the wall. He held his face perfectly serious, banging out a series of sounds that had no form or rhythm at all. It was pure circus.
    Johann Sebastian Bach! he said.
    He stopped and we launched into a drunken round of applause. Petr was momentarily shell-shocked but rescued himself admirably—instead of stalking away, he went to the bathtub, bottle in hand, poured a long measure of vodka down Rudi’s throat.
    Together they finished the bottle, and then Petr held it above Rudi’s head and said: May you have as many troubles as there are drops left in this bottle.
    I do not wish to get wet, laughed Rudi.
    The evening grew wilder and drunker. We ate bread with horseradish sauce—it was all we could find—until a friend of Petr’s arrived with three hard-boiled eggs to share. RosaMaria took her guitar from its case and sang Spanish songs in a dialect I didn’t entirely recognize. Rudi went around the room with a metal saucepan, and he hammered on the woodwork, the tiles, the floor, the sink, until the neighbors began complaining.
    Just at that moment Iosif came home. I met him at the door, shouted: Let’s dance! He shoved me away and I slammed into the wall. The room went silent.
    Iosif yelled: Get the fuck out of here! Everyone! Get the fuck out!
    My friends looked at me and began to stub out their cigarettes in the ashtrays in slow motion, not quite sure what to do. Out! shouted Iosif. He grabbed Rudi by the collar and dragged him into the corridor. Rudi was astounded, his eyes wide. But RosaMaria stood in front of my husband and—simply by keeping her eyes locked on his—she made him stare at the floor. Finally Iosif went downstairs to the courtyard, to smoke, chagrined.
    The night began again. I was aware that something extraordinary had just happened, that RosaMaria had shifted a small axis in my life, if only temporarily, and I gave her a silent inner curtsy.
    She returned the next evening, accompanied by Rudi. He made himself immediately at home, talking animatedly about a myth he had read in his world literature class that day. It had to do with the Indian god, Shiva, who had danced within a circle of fire. He and RosaMaria were arguing about whether the act of dance was one of construction or destruction, whether if by dancing you made a work of art or you broke it down. Rudi maintained that you built a dance from the bottom up, while RosaMaria believed that the dance was there to be torn apart, that each move was an entry into the dance until it lay all around in separate, splendid parts. I watched them, not so much with regret but as a mirror unto myself and Iosif ten years previously, remembering how we once had talked of physics and language in the same dark and concentrated manner. They held court together until Larissa came over and the talk veered off into science, the theory of uncertainty again, which clearly annoyed the young dancers.
    When Iosif returned he actually sat at the table with everyone, and didn’t say a word, all polite resignation. He looked closely at RosaMaria, her dark hair, her wide smile, but then he pulled a chair next to me, even lit my cigarette. Iosif pronounced Chile to be his favorite country even though he had never been, and I sat pondering how rich I would be if every